Re: [Leica] What is in a name (Shakespeare)

[Walter S Delesandri <walt@jove.acs.unt.edu>]

Oh, hell, Erwin, LET US >>>>BELIEVE<<<<< IN THE SANCTITY OF ALL THAT IS 
OLD/LEICA/UNOBTAINABLE/EXPENSIVE/ETC>>>>>

WE NEED AN "OPIATE" FOR OUR MASSES (the LUG)...without DOGMA 
we'd probably be throwing rocks at one another or blowing up 
a lot of shit...
We NEED to believe that a bunch of drunk, hack-assed old photojournalists
that probably couldn't get a job today (at least not with a Leica and a 50-
this I KNOW for sure) KNEW THE TRUTH AND THE WAY, and we MUST follow 
them.......
I personally don't know anything about the 50 1.5 Zeiss, or the Nokton (old), 
but I am VERY familiar with the flarey-assed Canon 50 1.4, and the 
Summarit (damn, in the seventies you could get all you wanted for $75, and 
THERE's your "ultimate Bokeh"......)...of course, all these crap lenses 
are more expensive now cuz they're 25 years older, and they have much 
more haze and cleaning marks (anal collectors clean a LOT)...therefore, 
they should be MUCH better for REAL photography....hence their inflated 
values...


BTW, if you take ANY of this seriously, or take some bizarre kind of offense
to it,  then you're even 
farther gone than I 
thought....

CU later, 
Walt


On Wed, 25 Oct 2000 12:38:58 +0200 (CEST) imxputs@ision.nl wrote:
> It has been proposed about the Leica glow:
> You use them wide open or one stop closed, especially in high contrast
> environments, and it's there. The use of silver rich emulsions gives you a
> richness in the grays that more modern emulsions don't have. As to the rest
> I don't know because the glow is right there on the negs when scanned. It's
> partly halation, partly coma, partly flare, partly spherical aberration,
> partly the shape of the film's response curve... it's a lot of stuff,
> really. It's a 'look'. Thankfully it's so overdetermined that (a) you can't
> fake it in Photoshop (b) Erwin doesn't think it exists.
> 
> Well to be honest, flare and halation do exist and can be seen. And spherical 
> aberration and coma do lower local contrast and produce halation around light 
> sources. These phenomena are characteristic of all bad lenses and are not 
> typical of Leica lenses. No question about this. But why call these phenomena 
> the famous Leica glow? Flare is flare and it is bad. The wellknown Hamilton 
> pictures of dreamy hardly dressed young girls were made with excessive flare to 
> create a dreamy atmosphere. Any bad lanes can produce this effect. If you call 
> that "The Glow" I fully agree with you. 
> But the concept of "Glow" is supposed to be something mysterious, that can be 
> created only with oldere Leica lenses and some sorcerer's formulae.
> When you call the phenomenon of flare with its proper name, that is flare, I am 
> with you and then this phenomenon does exist.  
> 
> I do agree that silver-rich emulsions produce special effects which in 
> themselves are unrelated to the use of flare as a pictorial effect. And indeed 
> the use of negatives with a low CI value and the use of papers with a soft 
> gradation and the use of diffusion enlarger will all add to produce prints with 
> a low overall contrast. I do not think that these combined effects produce a 
> longer tonal scale and a richer quality of grey values than when you use 
> negatives with a normal CI value and papers with normal gradation. 
> But now we are jumping into a Zone Theory Discussion which is very interesting, 
> but not for this forum.
>  
> Erwin